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The 'Know Skateboarding' app

By Anthony Pappalardo

Published Thursday February 21, 2013

The Know Skateboarding app brings the web to skateboarders fingertips.

Know Skateboarding

I'll be honest, the older I get the lazier I become. So the promise of a one-stop skateboarding app that could save me tons of time and steer me away from another subpar, web-clip, sponsor me video sounded perfect. The Know Skateboarding app was released Tuesday, Feb. 5, and aims to be the go-to place for skateboarding in your hand. Another part of getting old is being skeptical, of course. How many different skate related apps have you downloaded only to delete them within minutes? Developed in only 14 months by Josh Friedberg of "411 Video" fame and Know Products, the Know Skateboarding app has fluidly integrated several popular web based services and content into one.

By interfacing with YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook and the Berrics, the app gets you all the skate news you need in one place. There's also a forum where you can share messages and images with a location option that shows you what's happening near by.

"The app is built for people to keep up with what's happening in skateboarding on a daily basis. There's this constant deluge of content now and if you get busy it's really easy to miss something amazing," said Friedberg of the app. "The goal is to create a single destination mobile platform for skateboarding. With content scattered between apps, iTunes and the four corners of the internet and with people glued to their phones 24-7, it seemed like skateboarders would appreciate the convenience of an app like Know Skateboarding."

Not having to sift through dozens of pages is something that would interest anyone who keeps up with skateboarding. You basically get a snap shot of that day's news from a tap after launching the app. Friedberg explained how they chose to set up news section, "We took a curation approach with our daily news updates so you'll always be able to catch the top 3 or 4 things that happened every day, even if you only have a few minutes to check out the app. If you want to dive deeper the video feed is being constantly updated -- we just crossed the 4,000 video mark."

Another highlight of the Know Skateboarding is the integration with the Berrics, which was a key part of Friedberg's vision for the app. "Our goal is to support anyone who's producing quality skateboarding content, and obviously The Berrics are a big part of what's going on today. I've known Steve [Berra] since our teenage years growing up in the Midwest. I've been speaking to him about the app since the beginning of development. Once we had a solid beta version I sat down with them and they gave me the thumbs up on including The Berrics in the finished product."

While many of the users will be content to just lurk and learn, the interactive aspect of the app could really get interesting. Being able to to access Instagram, Twitter and share their forum during live events like X Games, Street League or Tampa Pro could make Know Skateboarding a hotbed.

There's obviously a lot of potential for the Know Skateboarding app and no lack of content, but I was curious what Friedberg thought was the app's strongest feature, "I really like the search feature (magnifying glass) because it pulls from every component of the app and has some serious depth. It's pretty fun to be able to find content from years ago on a whim without having to sort through tons of internet garbage. The "Favorite" button is my other choice. The ability to mark and save any of the content you like is the modern day equivalent of collecting skate videos."